(This started as a post in ~gaming, but quickly became much less about the game and drifted into Meta territory.)
This is a pre-coffee ramble, so my logic's probably pretty flawed (and anyone who's ever kicked my ass in a boardgame would suggest my logic's often flawed).
I'm a boardgamer, and one of my favorite games (and one that's considered a modern classic) is Race for the Galaxy.
Let me explain the rules to you.
Okay, that would be a bad idea.
But let me summarize (and oversimplify -- if you're a fellow gamer, apologies for not taking a deep dive here).
In the game, you have cards that represent planets and technologies, and the goal is to get more valuable planets than the other players. But those same cards also double as the goods the planets and technologies produce.
In other words, the cards that represent value in the game are also the cards that are used to accomplish everything else in the game.
Now let's talk about Nostr and social media clients in general.
Most social media lets you react to a post by reposting or liking (different clients use different terms, but those are the core functions). Both of them are ways to give the post cred of some sort.
(Replying is also an option, of course, but it's separate from the other reactions in that it's an interaction that generates new content.)
Nostr uses both of these but then adds the option to zap. So if you see a post you like, there are three different ways you can tell the creator and the users of the system that you like the post. That's a lot, and leads to some decision lock/analysis paralysis. "I like this post, but should I hit the like button and repost it, or did it add enough value to also zap? And if I'm zapping, I should also be liking, right?"
Enter Stacker News.
Here, the zap does everything (other than replying, which is a different kind of reaction). When I zap a post here, I'm saying that A) its author deserves some sats, B) it's worth boosting/highlighting for other people, and C) that I like it.
In other words, the action that represents value at Stacker News is also the action that's used to accomplish almost everything else here.
And it's a reason that I find SN simpler, not more complicated, than Nostr and legacy social media sites. If I like something, I know exactly the one thing to do to say so.